Can Salesforce Send a Text Message? See How It Works for Education

Customer relationships are critical to an organization's growth and success. Salesforce is the leading CRM for building and nurturing these relationships by delivering a comprehensive 360-degree view of customers. As a result, sales and marketing reps can participate at various stages of the customer lifecycle, enhancing their experiences. Salesforce provides a variety of products, including marketing, sales, and service, to meet the distinct needs of various business sectors. So, when it comes to transforming and fostering student connections in education, the combination of SMS from Salesforce and Education Cloud is a potential game changer.

What is Education Cloud?

Most education institutions use multiple tools and systems to handle their operations, which puts a strain on their IT budgets. However, Education Cloud provides a more cost-effective way to manage operations without the need for multiple systems.

Education Cloud is a comprehensive system that includes a student information system (SIS), an academic management system, ERP, CRM, and a learning management system (LMS). This enables educational institutions to quickly simplify the educational process, provide a tailored experience to students, and reduce transformation expenses. One of the standout features of Education Cloud is that users can view student data from anywhere and at any time from any device.

SMS Salesforce with Education Cloud

One of the most significant advantages of employing text messaging is the ability to reach large audiences instantly without relying on internet connectivity. In addition, text message transmission is not confined to any one smartphone type. Even the most basic mobile handsets allow you to send and receive messages. This enables educational institutions to expand their reach by engaging with students even in locations with limited or no internet services. This is one great opportunity to leverage SMS Salesforce in higher education.

How GirikSMS text messaging works with Salesforce

GirikSMS is a 100% native Salesforce SMS app and integrates easily with Salesforce's Education Data Architecture (EDA), allowing you to connect with school stakeholders and manage inter-departmental operations and data within Salesforce. EDA, like GirikSMS, takes into account the full student journey and all of the departments that impact it:

• Recruitment and admissions
• Marketing
• Enrolment
• Student Success
• Faculty and staff
• Alumni and donor relations

EDA gives faculty and administrators a comprehensive view of students, including who they are, where they are from, their interests and preferences, and who they engage with.

When texting students, parents, counselors, or staff members, you can view the entire history of text message interactions and quickly determine the link between the entity and its affiliations with the institution (academic program, clubs, sports, cultural teams, and more).

When interdepartmental collaboration fails, administrators suffer. The process, performance, goals, and objectives become hazy. Your software systems should be flexible enough to handle a wide range of use case scenarios. You want a single app to manage the complete student lifecycle.

Every department on campus can boost communication response rates by engaging students, alumni, parents, staff, and other stakeholders via SMS messaging. Text messaging is the ideal way for any administrative department to meet its objectives.

GirikSMS's capabilities enable each department to communicate seamlessly through comprehensive views, data analytics and reporting, and inter-departmental automation.

How can educational institutions leverage SMS messaging from Salesforce?

Here's how various departments can leverage text messaging to communicate with their targeted stakeholder audiences.

Recruitment

Text messaging over SMS and WhatsApp gives recruiters global access to prospective students.

• Quickly collect inbound marketing data using the survey capability in Education Cloud. When a student consents to receive text messages from your institution by sending a keyword to your institution's text messaging number or short code, you immediately acquire their phone number (the primary point of contact).
• GirikSMS's in-built automation takes the contact information (which could include name and email) and creates or updates Salesforce records. Recruiters can choose to record additional information, such as their major during that first interaction.
• WhatsApp templates enable recruiters to do remote outbound marketing. With GirikSMS you can send outbound templates from its in-built template library to pique the recipient's interest and encourage them to opt in. This technique enables institutions to reach out to international students who may be unable to attend college fairs or campus tours.
• One-on-one text conversations provide personalized touchpoints for candidates with high interest in the institution. For instance, if an athlete had a standout performance, let them know you noticed. When you express a strong interest in a prospect, you foster their relationship with the school.
• Use personalized bulk messaging by drawing on CRM data to inform students about events and resources depending on their location, year of graduation, and chosen field of study. Educational institutions are today hosting virtual exhibitions and open houses digitally. Even if institutions cannot meet the ideal prospective candidates in person, they can still ensure good attendance at virtual events.

Admissions

GirikSMS, being native to Salesforce, seamlessly enables automation with Process Builder or Flow ensuring a smooth transition from recruitment to admissions. Admissions staff can use text messaging over SMS and WhatsApp to guide potential students through the entire enrolment process.

• Remind students of upcoming activities and deadlines for applications and enrolment.
• Admissions counselors connect with students one-on-one to discuss enrolment and financial assistance.
• Automate application status updates to avoid excessive requests from students and parents.

Student Success

Once students confirm they will be attending your institution, your student success teams will have the opportunity to nurture relationships with them over several years.

• Students provide valuable input using short and simple text message surveys. While working with several leading higher education customers we have seen that clients frequently establish a post-term cadence to determine how staff might allocate funds and resources for the subsequent semester.
• As part of these text surveys, give students the freedom and flexibility to vote via text. What kind of events do they want your institution to host? Where could you place a discretionary budget to improve the quality of campus life? With GirikSMS and Salesforce, you can create simple text message surveys with question-and-answer journeys with zero code. 
• Send class enrolment reminders in bulk based on graduation date and credits completed.
• Send personalized, automated communications to students with a GPA below a specific standard, directing them to schedule a discussion with their assigned counselor.
• Deploy conditional logic in forms and surveys to schedule meetings with student success, advisors, and career counselors.
• Automate congratulatory text messages for students who excel academically.
• Encourage timely payment of outstanding dues through text reminders to parents with links to complete payment.

Alumni and donor relations

You kept your students engaged and happy until graduation. Now that they are your alumni, they can be your finest PR agents and donors. Maintain contact with them so that they can participate in and develop the school network, as well as support your activities and fundraising efforts.

• Students' emails may no longer work, but their mobile numbers remain the same. Students may move frequently in their post-graduate years, so make sure you send them unobtrusive texts to stay connected. Send a text message seeking their most recent postal or email address. Incoming texts from them will automatically update the relevant Salesforce records.
• Use segmented bulk SMS with personalized Salesforce merge fields to inform alumni about ways to stay connected with your institution.
• Remind alumni of forthcoming events based on their graduation date and area.
• Use text-to-donate to provide contributors with a quick and easy option to contribute, capitalizing on the immediacy of text messaging.
• Use automated survey features to update contact information and solicit feedback.
• Automate yearly surveys and forms to track how your alumni are doing professionally and where they are.

GirikSMS: One app and one digital channel to keep all stakeholders engaged.

To prevent students from falling through the cracks, your Salesforce SMS messaging solution must be available to all departments. GirikSMS's automation enables departments to effortlessly shift text conversations and workflows across teams and departments as and when there is a change in a student's life cycle stage. When several staff members communicate with the same message recipient, past text conversations appear in the Conversation View with color-coded context at a glance.

GirikSMS SMS messaging for Salesforce transforms digital communications for educational institutions while being embraced by students, parents, and staff alike due to its extensive capabilities and ease of use.

About Author

Indranil Chakraborty

Indranil is a technology enthusiast with over 25 years of experience in project management, operations, technology and business development. Indranil has led project teams in egovernance, business process re-engineering, product development and worked with Government and Corporate customers. Indranil truly believes in the power of technology to drive productivity and growth for teams and businesses.